Bernard L. Madoff was handcuffed and whisked into a cell. Michael R. Milken, head in palm, wept. Martha Stewart simply stared straight ahead. If not for one person, these moments might be lost to memory. But when the mighty stumble, the court illustrator captures it forever. For Elizabeth Williams, who has spent more than three decades depicting criminals in court through her drawings, the job is a study of character.

Ms. Williams has covered the trials of terrorists and murderers, but she finds white-collar criminals the most fascinating. “I think it’s the greatest soap opera there ever was,” she said.

Ms. Williams has drawn notorious Wall Street criminals, including Ivan F. Boesky, one of the world’s most powerful financiers in the 1980s, who was convicted of masterminding Wall Street’s biggest insider trading scandal at the time, and Raj Rajaratnam, the hedge fund manager and Sri Lanka’s richest man, who was at the heart of a network of insider traders in the 2000s.

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